The notorious attempt by Colonel Thomas Blood (1617/18–80) to steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London in May 1671 while disguised as a clergyman inspired Marvell’s epigrams in Latin and English. It was only the most recent in a series of violent episodes that had punctuated Blood’s career: the plot to surprise Dublin Castle and seize the Lord Lieutenant, James Butler, duke of Ormond (1610–88), in May 1663; the rescue in July 1667 of his friend, Captain John Mason, who was being escorted to York to face trial for his part in the Northern Plot of 1663; and the ambush of Ormond’s coach in London in December 1670 either to hold him ransom or hang him at Tyburn. Marvell, who may well have known Blood personally, was au fait with these events and more, as he outlined in a letter to Sir Thomas Rolt on 9 August 1671:

One Blud, outlawed for a Plot to take Dublin Castle, and who seized on the Duke of Ormond here last Year, and might have killed him, a most bold, and yet sober, Fellow, some Months ago seized the Crown and Sceptre in the Tower, took them away, and, if he had killed the Keeper, might have carryed them clear off. He, being taken, astonished the King and Court, with the Generosity, and Wisdom, of his Answers. He, and all his Accomplices, for his Sake, are discharged by the King, to the Wonder of all.¹

Marvell’s news was hot off the press since the most astonishing turn of events in the whole saga was Blood’s having been pardoned by the King just over a week previously.²

Marvell attributes a specific motive to Blood in the opening lines of the epigrams, perhaps hinting at a disproportion between the injury suffered and the scale of the attempted redress:

Bludius, ut ruris damnum repararet aviti,

    Addicit fisco dum Diadema suo…

When daring Blud, his rents to have regain’d

Upon the English Diadem distrain’d…³

A more literal English rendering has recently been supplied by Victoria Moul:

While Blood, in order to make up for the loss of his ancestral estate,

    Was confiscating to his own reserves the royal diadem…⁴

In some texts of the Latin epigram, ‘ruris’ is replaced by ‘fundi’ or ‘reditus’.⁵ While all three terms are broadly susceptible of translation by ‘rents’ (see below), what points to ‘ruris’ as the preferred reading is that Marvell appears to be alluding to Juvenal’s satire Sixteen, ll. 35–6: ‘convallem ruris aviti / improbus aut campum mihi si vicinus ademit’ (‘Suppose some scoundrel of a neighbour has taken from me a glen or a field from my ancestral estate’).⁶ This being so, where was Blood’s ‘ancestral estate’ and what precisely happened to it? How closely, might we ask, did the scenario sketched in satire Sixteen match Blood’s predicament? And was Marvell, as so often, writing with an awareness of a subject’s personal circumstances?

It is true that a loss of property has often been alleged to be what set Blood on his spectacularly deviant path. An explanation of Blood’s conduct along these lines was aired as early as 1680 in Remarks on Some Eminent Passages in the Life of the Famed Mr. Blood by R.H.:

Upon the Kings Restauration, Mr. Blood returns again for Ireland. But being disgusted by some hard usage, which he thought done him by the Court of Claims, who made no hast to restore him his Land that had been taken from him; whereby he saw himself stripped of all, his Wife and Children sent a begging, and himself Outlaw’d. He went to the Irish, Scots, and discontented English, who being just ready to brake loose, and wanting a Head … [they] made him their General, and surrendred their Obedience to him in all things. So that now become a petty Prince, he began to put his complaints into Form, and Method, publickly to throw his Declarations abroad, and to make demands of redress … In prosecution of which design they ran themselves into a Plot for the surprize of Dublin Castle.⁷

While deeply flawed this account has proved very influential for scholars of both Blood and Marvell. For example, it is explicitly echoed by Alan Marshall: Blood ‘was alienated in the early 1660s by the Restoration settlement of Ireland: the “hard usage” that he received at the hands of the court of claims, some of his lands being taken away from him, reinforced the dissatisfaction of an Irish protestant and former parliamentarian with the policies of the new regime’.⁸ George deF. Lord maintains that ‘[f]or his activities on the Parliamentarian side in the Civil War he was rewarded with gifts of land by Henry Cromwell which were confiscated by the government after the Restoration’.⁹ Nigel Smith concurs. Blood ‘was a former Commonwealth JP who had been rewarded with property in Ireland, which he then lost at the Restoration … [and] sought redress for his loss of property in the plot at Dublin in 1663’.¹⁰ While the stories are similar, they differ in detail. What Blood lost was variously ‘all’ of ‘his Land’, ‘some of his lands’, ‘gifts of land’, or the ‘property in Ireland’ assigned to him by the Commonwealth.

Significantly, R.H. stipulates that the ‘hard usage’ Blood received at the hands of the Court of Claims consisted in its inaction in failing to restore land that had already ‘been taken from him’. This of course begs the question of when and under what auspices such confiscation might have happened in the first place. At the Restoration, Charles II was inundated with petitions from dispossessed Catholic and Royalist landowners and issued many letters in their favour under the privy seal though few of these apparently had any effect. His Majestie’s Gracious Declaration for the settlement of His Kingdome of Ireland, and Satisfaction of the several Interest of Adventurers, Souldiers, and other His Subjects there of 30 November 1660 simultaneously promised that soldiers and adventurers could retain the lands they held on 7 May 1659 (the day the Rump was restored) and that Catholics (and Protestants) who were certifiably innocent of involvement in the Irish Rebellion would get their land back. It also named 38 individuals (mostly Catholic) deserving of the King’s grace and favour who ‘without being put to any further proof, shall be restored to their former Estates’.¹¹ The commissioners named to execute the terms of the Declaration met in March 1661 but proved wholly ineffectual because of doubts about their legal authority. Eventually, An Act for the better Execution of His Majesties Gracious Declaration for the Settlement of His Kingdome of Ireland (1662) incorporated and gave statutory effect to the Declaration, naming seven new commissioners – this time all English – who constituted the Court of Claims. It began its hearings on 13 January 1663 and had completed them by 21 August. In that time, ‘the court issued 566 decrees of innocence to catholics and 141 to protestants: 113 catholics were declared “nocent”’.¹² Several thousand petitions were left unheard.

According to Thomas Carte, Ormond’s eighteenth-century biographer, Blood had ‘served in Cromwell’s army, in the post of a lieutenant, and had some lands allotted him for his arrears’.¹³ It is possible that Blood lost these lands notwithstanding the assurances given to soldiers in the Declaration but there is no evidence that this happened or, if it did, that Blood subsequently claimed innocence before the Court. And in any event, as Carte immediately goes on to point out, no actual loss but merely the ‘apprehension of being dispossessed of these lands, upon proof of the old proprietors’ innocency, or else his professed hatred of Monarchy and Episcopacy’ was sufficient to have ‘caused him to embark in that affair’.¹⁴ In this respect, Blood was no different to all the other ‘adventurers and soldiers [who] began to fear, every one for himself, that they should lose their lands’ and therefore joined the conspiracy.¹⁵ Carte’s conjecture is borne out by the fact that Blood had allegedly begun ‘contriueing the way and meanes of takeing the Castle’ by September 1662, several months before the Court of Claims began its hearings.¹⁶

The Dublin Plot, fatally compromised by informers, collapsed in a series of arrests on 21 May. Blood managed to escape but a proclamation on the 23d ordered him and other named individuals to surrender within 48 hours or be declared ‘Rebells and Traytors against his Ma^tie his Crowne’.¹⁷ It was only now that Blood was outlawed and thereby forfeited his estates (the Remarks gets the order of events back to front). Within two weeks Sir Gilbert Talbot (c. 1601–95) was staking a claim:

There is one blood that wass very notorius in this last wicked plot, and is fled, who hath a small howse and a hundret pound a yeare of land in the baronie of donboyne in the county of meath of his owne ancient inheritance. Tis now forfeited to his ma^tie. I haue begd this of the King. The duke and dutches of York [and] the Earle of Bath will speake for me to his ma^tie. I doute not of y^r honest fauor in this in putting his ma^tie in mind of it. I know tis the forme to haue my lord L^ts recommendations, but I did not desire it, but doe hope on his ma^ties orders to preuaile w^th him. I wass afraid to be refused it, soe as if y^r honor plese to gett it in an absolute order to my lord L^t heere.¹⁸

Talbot, on the lookout for ‘small grants’ promised to him by the King to offset his arrears but doubtful about his standing with Ormond, was marshalling his supporters at court – the duke and duchess of York, Robert Grenville, first earl of Bath (1628–1701), and Joseph Williamson (1633–1701), under-secretary to the secretary of state, Sir Henry Bennet – to circumvent the lord lieutenant.

The salient fact about Talbot for our immediate purposes is that from 1660 to 1690 he was master of the jewel house and therefore ultimately responsible for the safekeeping of the crown jewels. If Blood knew of Talbot’s attempt to acquire his ‘ancient inheritance’ then this would be an entirely comprehensible motive for the otherwise seemingly quixotic raid on the Tower. But, as we shall see, Talbot’s gambit failed with Ormond keeping Blood’s property at his disposal for three years before granting it to someone else (whose identity eventually became known to Blood). It is possible that Blood (and Marvell) remained altogether unaware of the 1663 nexus between Blood and Talbot which may therefore have been a matter of pure happenstance rather than something that proved to be of enduring significance. On the other hand, it is clear that a number of prominent members of the court took an interest in the matter, that knowledge of Blood’s circumstances was relatively widespread, and that Talbot’s intervention was not necessarily kept secret. In the absence of further evidence, however, an intriguing possibility must remain just that.

Blood’s estates were more extensive than Talbot thought. On ‘12 June 16 Chas. I, [1640] Letters patent’ were issued

to Thomas Bloud, gent., for a fine of £5.0.6.; of the towns, hamlets, and lands of Sarney, Beatowne, and Forgellestowne, barony of Dunboyne, Co. Meath; and 500^A of ferytile mountain, wood, and moor in the territory of Glanmalur al[ia]s. Ley Glynns, Co. Wicklow, adjoining the lands assigned to Brian Mc Phelim Mc Feagh Birne; rent 20/-.¹⁹

Apparently, Blood had benefitted before the Civil War from the patronage that an earlier lord lieutenant, Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford (1593–1641), extended to his friends in County Wicklow.²⁰ The next person to lay claim, Captain Toby Barnes of the King’s Regiment of Guards in Ireland, did perform due diligence. On 4 February 1664, Ormond ordered a custodiam (a grant of lands in the Crown’s possession giving the lessee the right to collect rents) to be granted to Barnes but the barons of the exchequer declined to do so until ‘His Majestie’s title should be found thereunto’. This Barnes undertook to establish ‘and at his very great charges found the lands … to have been the estate of the said Blood, at the time of his attainder, and thereby forfeited’. But when Barnes returned to the barons he was told to apply to the lord lieutenant ‘for some further interest in the said lands than a custodiam’.²¹ The question of what form this interest should take (either a grant of the lands in fee farm or a 31-year lease) was not resolved until 1666, leaving unaddressed Barnes’ request to be reimbursed for his expenses out of the tenants’ rents paid into the exchequer in the meantime.

It was only on 11 April 1666 that the King instructed Ormond to ‘take steps’ to grant Barnes ‘under the Great Seal a lease at such rent and for such a term as you think fit of the towns and lands’ forfeited by Blood.²² Two months later, an entry was duly made in the Patent Rolls:

The King, in Recompence of the Service of Captain Toby Barnes performed both in Ireland & beyond Seas & pursuant to Privy Seal, dated at Whitehall 11. April 1666, demised to him [Margin: B[arony of] Dunbnoyne, Co. Meath.] The Towns and Lands of Sarney Beatowne & Foylestowne – With all & singular the Lands & Hereditaments, which were in the tenure of Thomas Blood of Sarney, attainted of High-Treason, [Margin: Territory of Glanmalur, al[ia]s the Glynnes Co. Wicklow.] containing of unprofitable Mountain, Wood and Bogg 500^A. Which had been granted to the said Thomas Blood by Patent, dated 12. June 16° Car. 1. & were forfeited by his said Treason. – To hold to Captain Barnes & his Assignes from 1 May 1666 for the term of 31 years, at the rent of – 2^£ [Margin: 9. June 1666.].²³

Barnes, however, was only able to enjoy his new properties for a few years since he died in 1672.²⁴

In the interim, of course, Blood had attempted to steal the crown and been pardoned. A newsletter of 8 August 1671 claimed that ‘John [sic] Bloud … had a Pardon pass the Privy Seale … as alsoe a Restitution of all his Lands in England & Ireland’.²⁵ Even though Blood’s pardon itself made no mention of restitution, commentators have followed suit in maintaining that this is what now happened.²⁶ Others have instead adopted Carte’s suggestion that ‘Blood was not only pardoned, but had an estate of five hundred pounds a year given him in Ireland’.²⁷ Still others have tried to conflate the two narratives.²⁸ Perhaps significantly, Marvell has nothing to say on this subject in his letter to Rolt. What is certain is that Blood had no success in regaining his Irish estates before 20 December 1672, when – possibly in the knowledge that ‘M^r Barnes’ [sic] was now dead – he wrote to Lord Arlington asking for his help in securing a licence to bring a writ of error to reverse his outlawry. This was necessary because, as the legal brief attached by Blood explained, while the pardon would automatically have restored lands still in the King’s possession it would not restore lands previously conveyed to others, the attainder under which Barnes derived his title still being on record.²⁹ Accordingly, on 8 January 1673 the King wrote to the lord lieutenant (from 21 May 1672, Arthur Capell, first earl of Essex, who had succeeded John Berkeley, first Baron Berkeley) that, while Blood had been pardoned ‘together with restitucion to all Forfeitures of his Estate’, he was ‘not yet restored to the actuall Possession’ of his Irish property. He therefore authorized Essex ‘to give Lycence to the said Thomas Blood for bringing a Writt of Error for Reuersall of the said Outlawry’.³⁰ This presumably had the desired effect though it is striking that as late as 1679 and 1680 Blood was still petitioning to recover arrears of his tenants’ rents from Sarney for the last 38 years!³¹

We are now in a position to address the intertextual relationship between Marvell’s epigrams and Juvenal’s satire Sixteen. It should be said, first of all, that ‘rents’ is a legally precise and witty rendition of ‘ruris’. By ‘rents’ we should understand not (only) payments by Blood’s tenants to him but the annual payments by him to the Crown on grants of land by letters patent (as seen above in the 1640 and 1666 documents). It thus functions as a synecdoche for the lands themselves – and also as an instance of meiosis in minimizing the detriment Blood had suffered. The legal terminology continues with ‘distrain’d’. This certainly had the meaning of “grasped” as Smith suggests but it more commonly referred to the act of seizing a person’s property to compel payment of a debt.³² Nevertheless it would be hard to say whether the effect of the understatement is to extenuate or – paradoxically – to aggravate Blood’s offence.

We can gain some purchase on Marvell’s intentions if we turn directly to satire Sixteen. Although this is an unfinished fragment of 60 lines it has much to say on the themes of law and violence. Juvenal’s persona is that of a civilian offering ironic reflections on the advantages of the soldier’s life. The legal privileges that soldiers – especially the praetorian guard based just outside Rome – enjoy are spelled out in lines 7–34. When a soldier assaults a civilian it turns out that they can do so with impunity because they are subject to martial rather than civil law. Nothing much could be expected from camp justice except another beating, it being ‘easier to find a false witness against a citizen than a true witness against a soldier’.³³ Soldiers are also better placed in disputes over property (lines 35–50). A citizen whose land has been seized will have ‘to wait for the time of year which sees the start of lawsuits brought by the entire populace’ (‘expectandus erit qui lites incohet annus / totius populi’; ll. 42–3). (The legal year began on 1 January and ended in October with no new cases being accepted after September.³⁴) But soldiers ‘have the times of cases set at their own convenience. Their resources are not frittered away by the long drag of a lawsuit’ (‘quod placitum est ipsis praestatur tempus agendi, / nec res atteritur longo sufflamine litis’; ll. 49–50). For everyone else, litigation is a waste of time and money.

With whom is Blood to be identified in these scenarios? On the one hand, Blood lost out to a soldier, Captain Barnes, though as we saw Barnes himself had to go through a tortuous process before finally acquiring the estates in 1666. As an outlaw, Blood was to be deprived of any legal recourse whatsoever until 1673 (hence the tongue-in-cheek redescription of his actions as standard legal procedure). On the other hand, Blood would appear to have much more in common with the praetorian bully-boys than any long-suffering civilian subject to the law’s delay. Time and again he took the law into his own hands with the keeper merely being the latest victim of his thuggish tendencies. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to conclude that the epigram is ultimately intended to be critical of Blood. For it is only when the epigram executes a pivot in its last two lines that the true object of Marvell’s animus comes into view.³⁵ The thought Marvell had put to Rolt – that if only Blood had ‘killed the Keeper’ he might have got clean away with the jewels – is now reconfigured and repurposed:

Si modo sævitiam texisset Pontificalem

    Veste sacerdotis; rapta Corona foret.

With the Priests Vestments had he but put on

A Bishops cruelty; The Crown was gone.

Blood had disguised himself as a clergyman but was not the real thing in more than one sense. Whereas he had allowed ‘Lay-pity’ to prevail, any bishop would have been far more cruel.

Blood was thus the vehicle rather than the target of Marvell’s satire. But while the antiprelatical thrust of these lines is clear and was something with which Blood would have sympathized (Carte noted ‘his professed hatred of Monarchy and Episcopacy’) there is an anti-Catholic inflection in the Latin text that may have been no less apropos.³⁶ As Moul rightly points out, the ‘phrase “saevitiam … pontificalem” contains an untranslatable ambiguity, since a “pontifex” can refer in Latin to any sort of “chief priest”; it is a common classicising term for a bishop (alongside “episcopus”) but it is also of course the standard term for the Pope himself’.³⁷ At least one version of the English epigram attempts to preserve the ambiguity of the Latin; instead of ‘Bishops cruelty’ it reads ‘Mitral Cruelty’.³⁸ Besides continuing the trope of vestments, ‘Mitral’ is indeterminably poised between an English bishop and the bishop of Rome.

At this point it is worth recalling that the Dublin plot was largely a presbyterian enterprise.³⁹ For the plotters, several of whom were clergymen, the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, dedicated to the extirpation of popery and subscribed by Charles II in 1651, was a paramount concern. It featured repeatedly in the manifesto they prepared, one copy of which was alleged to be in Blood’s handwriting.⁴⁰ The prime source of their alienation from the restoration settlement was that

notwithstanding all those Obligations of Oathes & Covenants lying on his Ma^tie for the Extirpating of Popery … hee hath suffered himselfe so farr to be seduced by evill Councellerrs that even those … bloody papists … were the first y^t tasted of his R[oy]all Clemency in haueing their justly forfeited Estates at his first comeing in by Paper Orders taken from the Protestants illegally and conferred on them.⁴¹

A loss of property mattered to the extent that it was evidence of a resurgent Catholicism.⁴² The declaration concluded by underlining that the material grievances animating the plotters were inseparable from but subordinate to religious ones:

Wee do declare [we] will stand for that Liberty of Conscience proper to every one as a Christ[ian] for the Establishing of the Protestant religion in Purity according to y^e tenure of the Solemne league & Covenant the restoring each person to his Lands as they held them in the yeare 1659. the discharging the Armyes arreares …⁴³

This presbyterian agenda is not much in evidence in the Remarks but is what appears to have mattered to Blood who, it should be remembered, was to join covenanting presbyterians from the south and west of Scotland in the Pentland rising of 1666.⁴⁴

Looked at from this angle, the most telling term Marvell uses of Blood when writing to Rolt is ‘sober’. In Marvell’s lexicon this almost invariably expresses moral approbation and is frequently applied to those who exhibit moderation and self-discipline in religious matters. In A Short Historical Essay (1676), for example, the third-century Novatians, ‘the Puritans of those times, and a sort of Non-conformists’, are classed as ‘a sober and strictly Religious People’.⁴⁵ Blood was undeniably ‘bold’ but the key thing was that he was right-minded in religion.⁴⁶ Following his pardon, he and Marvell were to find common cause in upholding and implementing the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence that suspended legal penalties for nonconformists and Catholics at the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Marvell wrote The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) and The Rehearsall Transpros’d: The Second Part (1673) and Blood was an agent in procuring licences for nonconformists to worship in public (Catholics were allowed to worship only in private).⁴⁷ Both men were clients of the duke of Buckingham, the leading proponent of toleration in the Cabal regime.⁴⁸

But before we completely assimilate Blood to Marvell’s value-system it should not be forgotten that Marvell too was hot-headed at times. For example, on 5 January 1665, on the journey home with the Carlisle embassy, he exhibited a Blood-like boldness in dealing with a recalcitrant wagoner at Buxtehude. Since Marvell was ‘not able to bring him to reason by fair means, [he] tried what he could do by foul, and by clapping a pistol to his head would have forced him along with him’. However, ‘his pistol was wrested from him’ and he had to be ‘rescued out of the hands of a barbarous rout of peasants and Mechanicks’ by his companions who themselves became embroiled in a riot ‘with above a hundred of them’.⁴⁹ So much for moderation and self-discipline.

The epigram on Blood was by no means an isolated instance of Marvell’s anticlerical deployment of Juvenal in the 1670s. When replying to the overweening cleric Samuel Parker in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, he quoted from satires Six, Ten, and Fourteen. Juvenal is there variously dubbed the ‘Moral Poet’, the ‘Moralist’, and the ‘Moral Satyrist’.⁵⁰ Marvell returned to Juvenal for a final time in his final poem: ‘Grammatomantis’.⁵¹ He almost certainly sent this Latin poem to his nephew William Popple in Bordeaux in 1677 by way of a warning to him and his wife not to place their trust in the prognostications of the former diocesan clerk and now abbé, Lancelot Joseph de Maniban, after they had sought the abbé’s advice on Marvell’s fortune, supplying him with one of his letters for the purpose of graphological divination.⁵² The thought of the cleric’s intrusion into his personal space elicited a sharp rebuke from Marvell (ll. 13–16):

Abbas at (intrepres, quo non securior alter,

    non res, non voces, non ego notus ei,)

Rimatur fibras notularum, cautus aruspex,

    Scripturæque inhians consulit exta meæ.⁵³

[The abbot, however (a most assured interpreter, neither the matter, nor language, nor I being known to him) rakes through the entrails of our brief notes; the careful diviner, gaping, seeks counsel in the vitals of my text.]

The words highlighted in bold establish the connection with satire Six, Juvenal’s notorious catalogue of female misbehaviour, where he attacks the addiction of Roman matrons to the services of fortune-telling charlatans:

             calidae pulmone columbae

tractato Armenius vel Commagenus haruspex;

pectora pullorum rimabitur, exta catelli

interdum et pueri                               (ll. 549–52)

[… a soothsayer from Armenia or Commagene once he’s delved into the lung of a dove, still warm. He’ll probe the breasts of chickens, the insides of a puppy, and sometimes of a boy too…]⁵⁴

By implication, therefore, the Catholic abbot is being likened to Persian (‘Armenius’) and Syrian (‘Commagenus’) practitioners of the occult arts who are even prepared to kill children for the sake of divination while Mary (Alured) Popple is in turn to be identified with the credulous women who consult these Oriental soothsayers.⁵⁵

The upshot is that the Blood epigrams should arguably be seen as the earliest of Marvell’s antiprelatical writings in the 1670s.⁵⁶ It is thus no accident that Marvell redeployed the English version in ‘The Loyall Scott’ by way of concluding a virulent attack on the bishops.⁵⁷ But it is also the case that, as Marvell prosecuted his campaign against domineering and meddlesome clerics, Juvenal served as his literary adjutant.

Notes

1. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed., rev. Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2: 236. See E. E. Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell’s “Friend in Persia”’, N&Q 202 (1957): 466–7, for Sir Thomas Rolt, Governor of Surat (1677–81), as Marvell’s correspondent. [^{^}]
2. Grant of pardon to Thomas Blood, 1 August 1671: T[he]N[ational]A[rchives], SP 44/34 f. 110v (CSPD 1660–[1685], 409). [^{^}]
3. Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet d. 49, p. 246, where (unusually) the English version precedes the Latin one which is said to be ‘The same translated’. [^{^}]
4. Victoria Moul, ‘Marvell and Bilingual Verse Culture’, in Imagining Marvell at 400, ed. Matthew C. Augustine, Giulio J. Pertile, and Steven N. Zwicker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 111–30 (at 112). Moul (111–14) argues persuasively for the superiority and therefore priority of the Latin version. [^{^}]
5. For ‘fundi’, see Princeton University Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection of English and American Literature, RTC01, item 224, f. 8r, and British Library, Sloane 3413, f. 29v; for ‘reditus’, see British Library, MS Sloane 1941, f. 18r. [^{^}]
6. Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 508–09. The allusion is not noted by Moul or Estelle Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry: From Text to Context (Brussels: Latomus, 2003). [^{^}]
7. R.H., Remarks on Some Eminent Passages in the Life of the Famed Mr. Blood (London, 1680; Wing H111), 2. [^{^}]
8. See Marshall, ‘Blood, Thomas (16/17–1680)’, ODNB. Cf. Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood and the Restoration Political Scene’, Historical Journal 32, no. 3 (1989): 561–582 (at 562). [^{^}]
9. Poems on Affairs of State. Volume 1: 1660–1678, ed. George deF. Lord (New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 1963), 177. Hereafter, POAS. [^{^}]
10. Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 240. Cf. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 413. [^{^}]
11. His Majesties Gracious Declaration for the settlement of His Kingdome of Ireland (London, 1660; Wing C3013), 21. [^{^}]
12. J. G. Simms, ‘The restoration, 1660–85’, in A New History of Ireland, Volume 3: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691, ed. T. W Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 420–53 (at 425). [^{^}]
13. Thomas Carte, The Life of James Duke of Ormond, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1851), 4: 440. [^{^}]
14. Ibid. [^{^}]
15. Carte, Ormond, 4: 123. [^{^}]
16. Copy of the Deposition of James Tanner taken before the Lord Lieutenant, 31 May 1663, TNA, SP 63/313, f. 379v (CSP Ireland 1663–1665, 112). Cf. Colonel Vernon to [Henry Bennet], 30 May 1663: the ‘conspirators … now tell the truth and say that the design was in effect wholly Presbyterian and was on foot long before the Commissioners suits’ (CSP Ireland 1663–1665, 110); Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil. The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 146. [^{^}]
17. Proclamation by the Lord Lieutenant and Council, 23 May 1663, TNA, SP 63/309 f. 55v (CSP Ireland 1663–1665, 99). [^{^}]
18. Sir Gilbert Talbot to Joseph Williamson, 13 June 1663, TNA, SP 63/313 f. 451r-v (CSP Ireland 1663–1665, 133). Some punctuation supplied. [^{^}]
19. National Library of Ireland, Reports on Collections no. 122, NL Ire [Blood Papers]. This is a post-1945 typescript by Sir John Ainsworth of a small collection of material then in private hands. My thanks to Mary B. Broderick of the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections for her assistance. [^{^}]
20. See L. J. Arnold, ‘The Restoration Land Settlement in Counties Dublin and Wicklow, 1660–1688’ (D. Phil. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1967), 47. [^{^}]
21. Ninth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. Part II (London, 1884), 176 (Marquis of Ormonde papers). [^{^}]
22. The King to the Lord Lieutenant, 11 April 1666, CSP Ireland 1666–1669, 88. The 1640 letters patent are here mistakenly dated 1643; I have not been able to consult the original. [^{^}]
23. National Archives of Ireland: Grant to Captain Toby Barnes of lands in several counties, NAI Lodge/7/289. This is the entry in the Calendar in the manuscripts of John Lodge (1692–1774), deputy keeper of the records, Dublin Castle; available at <https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/NAI-Lodge-7-288>. [^{^}]
24. See Index to the Prerogative Wills of Ireland, 1536–1810, ed. Sir Arthur Vicars (Dublin, 1897), 22. The identity of his assignees, if any, remains unknown. [^{^}]
25. Newsletter to Walter Tucker, Lyme, 8 August 1671, TNA, SP 29/292 f. 43r (CSPD 1671, 421). [^{^}]
26. See POAS, Volume 1, ed. Lord, 177; Poems, ed. Smith, 414. [^{^}]
27. Carte, Ormond, 4:414; cf. Marshall, ‘Colonel Thomas Blood’, 569. [^{^}]
28. According to David C. Hanrahan, Colonel Blood. The Man who Stole the Crown Jewels (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), 121, ‘all Blood’s lands in Ireland, which were worth £500 a year, were restored to him’. [^{^}]
29. Colonel Thomas Blood to Lord Arlington, 20 December 1672, TNA, SP 29/319 f. 59r (CSPD 1672–1673, 295). [^{^}]
30. The King to the Lord Lieutenant, 8 January 1673, TNA, SP 63/333 f. 15r (CSPD 1672–1673, 409). [^{^}]
31. See CSPD 1679–1680, 164, 393. [^{^}]
32. See Poems, ed. Smith, 409. Cf. Anon., The Exact Law-giver (London, 1658; Wing E3652), 18: ‘he that maketh a Lease at will, may reserve an annual or yearly rent; in which case if the rent be behind, he may enter very well, and distrain the Goods and Chattels of the Tenant’. In 1676, Marvell became involved in a cognate case on behalf of Hull Trinity House when Edmund Clipsham tried to evade duties payable on deal planks. Marvell was annoyed when, instead of pursuing the case in Exchequer, it was ill-advisedly decided to distrain the deal: ‘Pray who did put you on making distresse whereby you ran your selfe as much as you could into the Common law, whereas this way lay plain before you? I know the [Hull Trinity House] Charter impowrs to distrain. But your Charter is not a Magna Charta. Country Counsell like ill Tinkers make work for those at London’ (For M^r Edmond Popple At Hull, 30 December 1676, P&L, 2: 287–8). See Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), 10, 159, 177–83, 188, 189, 192–3, 196. [^{^}]
33. Juvenal, Satires Book 5, ed. and trans. John Godwin (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 369. I am much indebted to Godwin’s commentary. [^{^}]
34. See J.P.V.D. Balsdon, Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome (London: Bodley Head, 1969), 79–80, 212–13. [^{^}]
35. For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s influential account of the epigram as a two-part form comprised of an “expectation” that builds (Erwartung) and a “disclosure” that resolves (Aufschluss), see Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 10–11. [^{^}]
36. Carte, Ormond, 4: 440. [^{^}]
37. Moul, ‘Marvell and Bilingual Verse Culture’, 113. Marvell was fully aware of the religious state of affairs in Ireland where his patron Anglesey was an important landowner: ‘I think it will be my Lot to go on an honest fair Employment into Ireland. Some have smelt the Court of Rome at that Distance’; Marvell to William Popple, April 1671?, P&L, 2: 323. [^{^}]
38. British Library, MS Sloane 1941, f. 18r. [^{^}]
39. Admittedly, this was not how Marvell saw it at the time: ‘There hath bin lately discoverd a plott of some of the old English army in Ireland to seize upon Dublin & the Lord Lieutenant’ (Marvell to Mayor Wilson, 6 June 1663, P&L, 2: 37). [^{^}]
40. See CSP Ireland 1663–1665, 111. Blood’s authorship is uncertain but is assumed in a Scots text entitled ‘Declaration of Colonel BLOOD and his Accomplices in Ireland’; Memoirs of Mr. William Veitch, and George Brysson, ed. T. M’Crie (Edinburgh, 1825), 508 (Appendix IX). [^{^}]
41. The Heads of the Intended Declaration by the Confederate Protestants of Ireland, TNA, SP 63/305 f. 207r; mis-calendared in CSP Ireland 1660–1662, 167–8. [^{^}]
42. See Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 153–4. [^{^}]
43. TNA, SP 63/305 f. 207v. [^{^}]
44. Admittedly, according to ‘R.H.’, Blood tried ‘to assert and uphold, as much as lay in his power, the Protestant and English Interest’ in Ireland but he also ‘manag’d his zeal with that prudence, which was then look’d upon as a kind of wonder’ (Remarks, 2). Religion otherwise features only intermittently and it is always Blood’s ‘prudence’ that is to the fore. [^{^}]
45. Andrew Marvell, Mr. Smirke; or, The Divine in Mode: Being Certain Annotations, upon the Animadversions on the Naked Truth. Together with a Short Historical Essay, concerning General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions, in Matters of Religion (n.p., 1676), 53/sig H3r. [^{^}]
46. An hitherto unnoticed account of Blood’s religious affiliation was given in a narrative of 13 May appended to a newsletter from John Starkey to Sir Willoughby Aston of 9 May 1671: ‘Captain blood, a very stout man. formerly a Papist and Captain in the old Kings Army under S^r Lewis Diues afterwards he was under Gen: Monke in Ireland where he had an estate of 300^l a year but being discontented engaged in y^e plot about 8 years since for surprise of the Castle of Dublin for which some were executed and he flyeing was outlawd for treason and his estate being forfeited was giuen the Ld Ossery’: British Library, Add. MS 36916, f. 223r. ‘Ossery’ was Thomas Butler, sixth earl of Ossory (1634–1680). My thanks to Nicholas von Maltzahn for this reference. Blood is listed as a Protestant in The Civil Survey A.D. 1654–1656, County of Meath Vol. V, ed. Robert C. Simington (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1940), 126; available at < https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/IMC-1931-CivilSurvey-5>. The two records are not incompatible if Blood changed his religious as well as political allegiance after 1649. [^{^}]
47. See CSPD 1671–2, 555, 591; CSPD 1672, 14, 201. [^{^}]
48. See ‘Notes by Williamson of information received from Blood and others’, 21 September 1671, CSPD 1671, 496 (‘Marvell w^th Bl[ood] from Bucks’). Cf. von Maltzahn, Chronology, 127–8. Carte, discussing the 1670 attack on Ormond, endorses the ‘general opinion … that Blood was put upon this assassination by the duke of Buckingham’ (Ormond, 4: 447). [^{^}]
49. Guy Miège, A Relation Of Three Embassies From his Sacred Majestie Charles II to the Great Duke of Muscovie, The King of Sweden, and The King of Denmark (London, 1669), 430–31. For another 1662 instance, see von Maltzahn, Chronology, 69. [^{^}]
50. The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, Nicholas von Maltzahn, and Neil Keeble, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:101, 103, 135. [^{^}]
51. This is the title of the poem in Worcester College, Oxford, MS 267/II, otherwise known from Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems (London, 1681), 53, as ‘Illustrissimo V[i]ro Domino Lanceloto Josepho de Maniban Grammatomantis (‘To a Gentleman that only upon the sight of the Author’s writing, had given a Character of his Person and Judgment of his Fortune’). I have followed the transcription and translation in Nicholas von Maltzahn and Rory Tanner, ‘Marvell’s “Maniban” in Manuscript’, The Review of English Studies, 262 (2012): 764–78 (as given at 769). [^{^}]
52. See Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Marvell and Maniban’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 35 (2009): 24–36; cf. von Maltzahn and Tanner, ‘Marvell’s “Maniban”’, 765. [^{^}]
53. The version in Miscellaneous Poems is more vague, substituting interpres (expounder) for abbas. [^{^}]
54. Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Braund, 284–5. Haan, Latin Poetry, 209, noted the allusion but did not fully explicate it. For the translation of Juvenal’s satire Six by William Popple’s grandson, see Stuart Gillespie, ‘A New Eighteenth-Century Juvenal Translator: William Popple’s Satires VI and X’, Translation and Literature 15, no. 1 (2006): 47–96 (at 51–82: ‘Juvenal Book 2nd: Satire 6th: Englished Against Women’). [^{^}]
55. Marvell appears to have resented (and feared) Maniban’s influence over the wife of his beloved nephew: see von Maltzahn, ‘Marvell and Maniban’, 24–36; cf. von Maltzahn and Tanner, ‘Marvell’s “Maniban”’, 765. And, like some modern commentators, he seems to have viewed satire Six as more misogamous than misogynistic: Gilbert Highet, Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 91; Susanna H. Braund, ‘Juvenal – Misogynist or Misogamist?’, The Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 71–86. [^{^}]
56. John Watson, vicar of Mildenhall, received a copy of the English epigram on 5 August 1672: British library, Add. MS 18220, f. 102v. [^{^}]
57. See Poems, ed. Smith, 409. The epigram features in Bodleian Library, MS Douce 357, British Library, Add. MS 73540, Royal Society, MS/32, and Yale Osborn MS fb106/17. [^{^}]

References